Sexuality Educator and Researcher
Research on femme-identified queer women is sparse, often framing the experiences of femme women through the lens of their sexual and romantic partners. Outside of quantitative data depicting broad experiences of discrimination and oppression that LGBTQIA+ individuals face every day in the United States, there is next to no qualitative research on queer women. How they understand and embody their queerness is left to speculation and generalization, drawing from stereotypes instead of rich accounts from these women themselves. The existing research on femme queer women has shown that femme queer women prioritize their partner’s identity, appearance, and financial standing less than heterosexual women. Research on their experiences is pertinent to develop and explore the unique strengths and barriers of queer women and how they take these themes into their romantic and sexual partnerships.
This study draws on interviews with self-identified femme queer women and explores how their identities impact how they relate to not only themselves but their partners; this research seeks to examine the power dynamics and intimacy present in queer relationships and how those factors relate to femme identity in the queer community.
The data for this project was collected over the course of a semester and employed interviews as the method of sociological data collection; interviews allowed participants to guide the research and interview questions, while also creating and maintaining their own boundaries throughout the interviewing process. The study required that participants self-identify as femme women. Since this research involved accessing the experiences of members of a minority population, a snowball sampling strategy, as well as person-to-person solicitation, were used to identify participants. Furthermore, using snowball sampling and person-to-person solicitation allowed typically unheard perspectives from the queer community to be highlighted. Participants for this study were limited to individuals in Asheville, North Carolina, and the age requirement for participation in the study was 18+. All participants were native English speakers.
An open coding approach using grounded theory, discussed by Charmaz in 2004 10 was utilized to allow themes and patterns to emerge from the data; grounded theory allowed the experiences of the women in the study to shape how data was interpreted and presented. At the time of each interview, participants signed two copies of the informed consent form, one of which they kept. A digital recording of the interview was made on the researcher’s iPhone, and that audio file was then uploaded to a password-protected folder and was deleted from the phone. In addition to the audio file, participant names were changed to maintain confidentiality. A separate document linking participant names to ID numbers was placed in a separate password-protected folder. The women in the sample ranged in age from nineteen to forty-six, with a majority of participants being in their mid-twenties. The experiences of these women will be discussed thematically, focusing primarily on visibility/invisibility, femme expression, and sexualization. Affinity diagramming was utilized to identify and develop the primary themes within the transcriptions. Notes from the accounts of the women were recorded on post-it notes and sorted until the primary themes emerged: experiences of visibility & invisibility, femme expression, and sexualization. Kathy Charmaz, “Grounded Theory,” Approaches to Qualitative Research: A Reader on Theory and Practice (2004): 496.
A set list of interview questions was utilized for each participant interview. Additional questions were asked to further develop rich histories and data from the women interviewed. Below is the interview guide for this field study.
Flying Under the Gaydar: How Femme Queer Women Navigate Visibility and Identity Interview Guide
This field study conducted interviews with queer women which created meaningful qualitative data on their experiences of queerness and their romantic and sexual relationship dynamics. There is very limited research on femme queer women, and the accounts of the women interviewed indicated unique experiences of sexualization, skepticism about the validity of their queerness from straight and queer people alike, and expressions of deliberately altered behavior in efforts to be read as queer. While this research focused on the experiences of seven queer women, all of whom were in the same geographic area, the themes found in their research highlight a need for more extensive research on queer women. Femme queer women are routinely left out of research, assuming that to be femme means to be feminine or straight-passing in a world where being straight is the norm. While being able to pass as straight and navigate when it’s safe to be queer is a privilege that femme women in the study had and expressed throughout the study, they also asserted that being assumed to be heterosexual meant having to work twice as hard to be seen as queer and accepted as a valid member of the community. This form of emotional labor is unique to femme queer women and highlights how crucial it is to hear queer experiences from an intersectional perspective that accounts for diversity in experience, presentation, and identity. Queer people make up millions of individuals living in the US, and femme queer women are a large and invaluable part of that community. This research served as a template for further research and started a conversation about resilient queer women who have been long overlooked in and outside of research.